Archival history
Handwritten note by Colin Smith – '"PINCER JACK" // Jack Millet hailed from Crickhowel in Wales and worked through necessity on an itinerant basis in various districts in England in the early years of the 20th Century. He was skilled as a blacksmith with a knowledge of toolmaking and repair, covering Horseshoeing or Farriery as it is now known. Horse power then was predominantly on the land, on the streets, in the woods, on the sea shore, covered by those main breeds of heavy horse, the Suffolk Punch, the Clydesdale and the Shire. Depending on the work of individual horses or teams and their size, horses were shod with size of metal suitable for the wear. Horses used in Industry, delivering, almost always heavy loads, on the roads needed heavy and wide sections of iron to combat the wear, most of these horses needed to be large and strong examples of their breeds. Horses used in agriculture did not on average wear as many shoes out. It was not unusual for horses used by breweries, Railways, Docks, Timber extraction etc were shod with iron size 1 ½ inches by 5/8” thick. Agricultural horses were shod with iron size 1 ¼ inch by ½ inch thick or 1 1/8” x ½” or 7/16” thick. // Whatever the work of horses of this period shoeing horses was hard heavy work, good tools were essential to get the job done as quickly as possible, and cut down the time spent holding the feet up and working underneath the horse. Pincers were used to remove the existing and mainly worn shoes, to pull nails from the hoof and use in conjunction with the hammer in clenching the nails, after the new shoes have been nailed on. // At this period in time tools were not manufactured to the extent that they are today which brings us back to “Pincer Jack”. // Pincer Jack has become somewhat of a legend in Farriery. He was known in the local area in blacksmiths shops arriving on his bicycle and offering his services which due to the quality of his workmanship became well known and in demand. He is known to have called at the forges of Mr Caswell and sons of Theale, Charles Double and sons of Spencers Wood, and Charles Herbert of White Waltham, who was apprenticed to his uncle, having cycled from Gloucestershire to take up his apprenticeship. // George Day was apprenticed to Mr Casswell at Theale before 1914 and watched Pincer Jack making pincers from a sixteen inch tangless horserasp, he said Pincer Jack would never let him see how he tempered them. After service in the First World War 1914-1918 as a farrier George Day returned to Mr Casswell until shortly after he took up a position with the Benyon Estate at Englefield and stayed all his life retiring in the early 1960s. George Day therefore carried on this unique skill of making Farriers Pincers by hand. The link was carried on by his apprentice Cyril Fuller who was given the opportunity of an apprenticeship by the Benyon Estate from 1939 till 1944. As an apprentice with Cyril Fuller from 1959 till 1966 we always used handmade pincers from horserasps. The great advantage of handmade pincers was that they could be tailor made to suit the user and type of horses shod, placing strength and refinement to suit, exactly as Pincer Jack had done in shoeing heavy horses, this principle could be used in making pincers for work on Racehorses, Ponies, Hunters, Event horses, etc. // Horserasps were and are made from medium carbon steel which were after use and blunt a valuable source of water hardening steel which could be file welded and used for a great deal of uses by a blacksmith in making tools. // Pincers for horseshoeing were made originally from one sixteen inch tangless rasp, a jaw being forge on each end of the rasp, then split behind the area which is riveted to form the handles ending up with two halves with jaw loss which has a hole for the rivet and the two handles. // In latter years these sixteen inch rasps without tangs were not made as they were mostly used in the heavy horse era, and so pincers were made from two smaller rasps.’, Hampson, P., & Son. 2007. Anvil Action: An Introduction To Horse Shoe Making. Lindford : P. Hampson AWCF., Hampson, P., & Son. 2007. Anvil Action: An Introduction To Farriery Tool Making. Lindford : P. Hampson AWCF., Hogg, Garry. 1964. Hammer and Tongs. London : Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd. P.76-77.- 'The shoe now goes back into the fire again: he has still to make the clip, before giving the final touches to the shoe and leaving it to cool in readiness for fitting. The forging of the clip is perhaps the most delicate operation of all. // Hitherto he has been using a light hammer - unless he has been working on a particularly heavy pair of shoes. This will have been his cross-peen or straight-peen. He may continue to use this handy all-purpose hammer even for making his clips, but he is more likely to lay it aside and pick up the oddest-looking hammer in all his armoury of these essential tools. This is his Cat's-head. It has a heavy head, with two main striking faces on opposite sides of the hickory haft, and two small, wedge-shaped projections opposite each other and at right angles to the main faces. These somewhat resemble a pair of ears - hence, perhaps, the term 'cat's-head'; or it may simply be the squareness of the head that has something in common with the head of a cat. It is, in fact, a four-face hammer, though two of the faces are little more than small, blunt wedges. It is these that he calls into use when forging his clips. // ... // To make it, the smith lays his shoe, red-hot at the exact point, on the far edge of the anvil and strikes it sharply with the wedge face of his cat's-head. First there is a slight recess, or dent, in the edge of the iron; repeated and accurate striking with the hammer forces the soft metal outwards and upwards in such a way that it automatically assumes the hollow triangular shape of a cat's ear. Blint at the base, where it 'grows' out of the iron, it tapers off to a fine edge at the point. To watch this process, so swift and sure, by which a thick piece of metal, on a curve, is extruded into a delicate leaf-like ear is to realize the extraordinary degree of skill that underlies the smith's apparently heavy-handed manipulation of a two- or three-pound hammer.'
